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Plaything 2 Guide Part II

What First: Part I

Ok, last part we got as far as laying textures on the car, either by (what I'm gonna call em) tiling (one texture laid per click) or by mapping (picking an area then applying a texture to it). So what if the texture don't fit the way ya wanted. There's two ways to fix this.... edit the texture, which in some cases is a as simple as rotating the texture in your paint program and saving. In other cases this isn't a realistic proposition, the things you'd have to do to the texture to get it to fit would give Freddy Krueger nightmares. This is where mapping comes in, and where I find Plaything is most useful. Ok, I'm going to assume the texture has already been laid on the model and you're looking at it and mebe feeling a little dissapointed (like me, many times), no need to, right click in the view window and select pick. Make sure the pen tool is NOT selected. Now click over the area you want fixed until it's all highlighted in green. Sometimes it's hard ta see what you are doing in P2, so here are a few tips ta help, this is the fun stuff.

• Goto the View menu and select Preferences. Now select a background colour, I find blue works well, hit ok to choose the colur, and ok again to confirm.
• W is wireframe, this is helpfull because you cant allways see selected areas when the cars texture is on, I guess it gets in the way. It toggles between Wire and Textured.
• Right click in the view window and select Rotate, the cursor will change to the Rotate icon. Now hold down the right mouse button and move the mouse. Cool huh!
• Right click on the view window title, in the top left corner and select setup. You get a choice here, choose the bottom left icon. Now you get full screen for each window, and can select the window viewed by right clicking the window title and selecting.
• A zooms in, Z zooms out, / and * on the keypad decrease and increase the amount of zoom respectively.
• IMPORATNT TIP, after moving, rotating etc the model around, hit CTRL R to reset the models position before you save, otherwise you'll have the model saved in an odd position. More than once I've had cars going sideways in the game because of this. If CTRL R doesn't work, I've found selecting Undo from the Edit menu has the same effect (and seems to be all it does too).

Ok, back to business. The areas highlighted, now right click and choose Edit Mapping. You'll get a new tool window pop up as well as an enlarged view of the area in question. Now the best way to get to grips with this is to experiment with it yourself. I could prattle on for ages about this and that, but it'll probably make more sense to you if you just play around with it, but here are a few pointers. Reset button, if the wireframe over the tex in the large window looks odd or is a bugger to edit, hit this. What you'll get is a more accurate representation of the area selected, which you can then mess with. The points on the wire frame can be selected and moved about the window. If one seems to get 'stuck' on the mouse, right click frees it. I find it easier to reduce the numbers in the U and V boxes to 1 (use the buttons, typing it in doesn't seem to work). This makes the selected wireframe cover just one texture.  Selecting other numbers just tiles the texture in the selected area, mostly looks ugly. The icon in the top right of the new tool window makes the selected area fill, as much as it can, the texture. The two icons to the top left flip horizontal and vertical. The selectable buttons Scale, Slide, Spin and Shear do just that, the + and - buttons adjust the degree of effect. It's allways a good idea to turn this down to start with, you can allways turn it up and stops P2 from dicking around on ya. Use all of these to edit the area to your liking. Drag the large window around the screen so you can see whats going on on the model behind it. When your happy, click X on the large view, and hit D to deselect the area just edited (I've forgotten to do this before now and buggered up what I've just done by selecting another area, and inadvertently editing both areas at the same time.... sux). As allways, experiment, this is only a rough guide, stuff I've found out by buggering around with P2. This I think covers most of what I've discovered, hope this one also makes sense. I've also found out how you can do basic model shape editing with P2, and how you can create the carnameSHELL.dat from the ACT and carname.dat files. Thats kinda complicated so I'm not even gonna touch on that till I get more familiar with it. What I will do is write a short bit about how to get flashing textures onto a model using P2 and a bit of TXT editing. Thats how I got the flashing lights on the UFOol, but the Toxic Ragers haven't put up a piccy of that ver so I guess its a suprise to most ppl who download it

Scarehead

Next: Flashing textures <-Watch this link!

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